lifting weights

My three days of gardening over, this morning it was back to three days at the plant centre.  The manager had left us a list of jobs to do over the weekend sellotaped to the counter by the till, as is his custom.  These tend to err on the optimistic side i.e. long, but even so my initial reaction on reading my list of tasks was that he must be having a laugh.  Could I empty the red trolleys, please, and then tidy the herbaceous section, and jazz up the displays at the ends of the herbaceous tables.

The red trolleys are used to move plants between the sales area and the polytunnel and standing areas on the far side of the car park, where customers are not allowed to go.  They also double up as potting benches during the winter, which means removing the upper tier of shelving, an infuriating job.  There were two of them waiting at the back of the plant centre this morning, both fully packed on the top and bottom shelves, plus a couple of the silver trolleys you would use for your shopping, also filled with plants to go out for sale.

After watering inside the tunnels I set to.  It's actually quite a pleasant job, as you get a close look at the plants while taking them off the red trolley and putting them in a silver trolley to wheel them out for sale.  It's interesting to see what's available, and nice to see them per se.  Today there was a dinky form of Solomon's Seal whose little white flowers came in pairs on its arching stalk, Polygonatum biflorum (naturally enough).  Some of them are truly not very exciting to look at yet, like the hostas with the merest sliver of green shoot nosing above the compost, just enough to demonstrate that they are alive in there.  But if you like plants it's a good chance to see lots of them close up and personal.

Then there's a certain amusement in trying to pick out efficient trolley loads of plants that are all displayed close together in the plant centre, to minimise the distance walked and amount of doubling back.  And then sometimes you need to move up the existing stock to make room for another row of an extra variety, which is an excuse to look at yet more plants.

My colleagues were very good about manning the tills and leaving me to get on with my Herculean task, which  was helpful of them, and certainly makes up for the time they left me stuck on the till for most of a Saturday, while getting on with their own more interesting (and open air) projects.  I made good progress, though by mid afternoon I was starting to feel quite tired.  By later afternoon I realised with some incredulity that I was actually going to finish emptying both red trolleys, and the two extra small ones.  I cleared the last three dwarf iris and a pine with twenty minutes to spare.

I measured the trolleys, because I wanted to quantify how many pots I'd moved.  Each shelf is a shade over a metre wide, and 2.2m long, and I'd cleared four of them.  The silver trolleys hold 18 2L plant pots.  All up I reckon I lifted enough pots to cover roughly 9.5 square metres, most of them twice, because I had to move them from the red trolleys to a silver trolley to push them around the plant centre, and lift them out of the silver trolley putting them out for sale.  As well as that I lifted quite a few plants moving them up to make room for the new ones.

You could join a gym, if you are worried about developing flabby upper arms.  Alternatively you could just get a job in plant retailing.